Political rhetoric and ideology create chains of empty signs ultimately saying nothing: “Everyone has to think differently, but in the same way,” as Věra Chytilová put in the mouth of a communist bureaucrat in her 1989 dark comedy Tainted Horseplay, whose digitally restored version had its world premiere at the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Chytilová depicts social relations as empty rituals guided by nothing other than the pursuit of pleasure. In a world of empty signs, we are, in the end, all alone. Tainted Horseplay is a bizarre treasure of Czechoslovak film; it might not be Chytilová’s masterpiece, but it’s possibly her horniest and most charming film, with exuberant hedonism, over-the-top performances, and moments of tenderness. It is infectious in every sense.
Set in the posh spa town during late socialism, Tainted Horseplay is also the ultimate Karlovy Vary film: Cheap champagne flows as three thirty-somethings pass their nights swapping girlfriends or picking up women for casual sex. Featuring actors from the Sklep Theater, the film follows three friends: corrupt tax inspector and compulsive womanizer Pepe (Tomáš Hanák), veterinarian Milan (Milan Šteindler), and František (David Vávra), who runs a cultural center that later turns into a socialist youth club. Apart from their dull day jobs, their lives revolve around the relentless pursuit of sex, as they drift past the city’s colonnades and springs.
The leader of the pack, fuckboy Pepe, is obsessed with nature documentaries—and Chytilová weaves in hilarious footage from Czechoslovak TV, with a tarantula and a lion that feigns indifference to seduce its prey. Pepe and his friends chase down girls literally everywhere: from dark arcades to the veterinary laboratory. They concoct ever more elaborate schemes to get laid. In one scene they pose as wealthy West Germans, in another they reroute a ski slope to trap girls. On the promenade, Pepe meets a mysterious Frenchwoman (Chantal Poullain) and, disguised as a waiter, slips into her hotel room. He watches her shoot up heroin, then sucks a drop of her blood during sex. Meanwhile, František fucks his colleague in a broom closet—when Pepe joins she flees and, wrapped in an American flag, crashes a communist youth meeting.
The whole thing is totally silly, great fun, and feels like a boozy relic from another era: Women in Tainted Horseplay are not so different than the prey in Pepe’s wildlife clips. Most of the film is driven by sexist slapstick, repetitively laddish banter, and the inexhaustible horniness of Chytilová’s characters. It’s interesting to see her film as playing with voyeuristic pleasure, of both viewer and director. She was almost sixty when she made the film, clearly taking vicarious enjoyment in her actors. Whose desire do they embody? Hers, theirs—or ours?
Not that Chytilová is blind to the social ills of her time: nihilism, selfishness, the erosion of values. Yet the film refuses any moral certainties and political clichés. Her version of late socialism—the period of “Normalization” that followed the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion—is not all conformity and stifling bureaucracy (though we see those too). She is more interested in the era’s anarchic hedonism, an energy of excess that still feels contagious today.
Contagion is, on various levels, the guiding principle of Tainted Horseplay. Capitalism slowly creeps in as socialist society dissolves into empty signs, friendship and trust break down, and carefree promiscuity gives way to paranoia as a new virus without a cure spreads from body to body: AIDS. Chytilová was among the first filmmakers in the Eastern Bloc to take up this taboo topic. Her film turns dark after the skiing trip: Pepe falls sick and tests positive for HIV. His spiraling decay begins when their car gets stuck in the snow and has to be pulled out by a horse-drawn sleigh, of the sort that still carries tourists around Karlovy Vary today (which gives the film its Czech title, Kopytem sem, kopytem tam, literally, Hoof Here, Hoof There).
Panic spreads among the group as Pepe is left isolated in his hospital bed. In the face of the virus, everyone is alone in their own body. Sex becomes a source of terror and loneliness. The city itself transforms from a terrain of desire into a site of infection, as the camera lingers over its faucets and fountains, where visitors drink from the same thermal springs. Blood streams and fluids converge into one toxic stream of transmission. Fittingly, the campy play within the film, directed by František, has the actors perform as warrior lymphocytes with swords, embodying the white blood cells that fight illness.
The screening of Tainted Horseplay celebrated both film and festival. The Grand Hall of the iconic Thermal Hotel was packed, while the cast took to the stage to share memories of working with the cult director. The actors were perpetually drunk during filming and Chytilová was a tyrant on set. They recalled how, in one scene, they set fire to the French dining room of the iconic Grandhotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary, which also served as a backdrop for Casino Royale and inspired The Grand Budapest Hotel. The Grandhotel Pupp’s cinema screened another festival film about the nexus of loneliness, desire, and contagion, Arthur Harari’s The Unknown, a captivating and mysterious journey that polarized Cannes. Like in Tainted Horseplay, an “unknown” epidemic spreads through sex, travelling from body to body.
The Unknown is a wonderfully elusive noir take on the body-swap movie, centered around washed-up photographer David (Niels Schneider). It opens with a carnivalesque New Year’s Eve party to which he is dragged by his friends, an orgiastic ball complete with masks and a Trump piñata; the atmosphere is lush and steamy. After taking a pill, David catches sight of Eva (Léa Seydoux), a woman he once photographed. The moment their eyes meet feels electrifying. What draws him to Eva is more than sexual desire; it feels like a demonic force. He follows her into the basement, where their frenzied sex culminates in an orgasm that makes both faint.
The moment David wakes up, everything has changed. He finds himself trapped in Eva’s body. Is this a drug-induced hallucination, like the medieval delirium of reincarnation? Or a case of metempsychosis, the passing of the soul from one living body to another? Keeping the viewer in the dark for a gripping near two-and-a-half hours, Harari sends his protagonist on an investigation that ultimately reunites David with his former body—which, by that point, is no longer inhabited by Eva. Its new host is the teenage girl Malia (Lilith Grasmug), who entered David’s body after some ferocious fucking in the bushes during a hip-hop concert. So far, so confusing.
Yet The Unknown doesn’t lose its suspense. We are seductively drawn into piecing together what this mysterious force behind the body swaps—the “unknown”—might be, whether it’s a substance, an invader, an evil force, a demon, or a strange illness befalling strangers who fuck each other. Adapting a graphic novel he wrote with his brother, Harari nods to the gnostic Christian belief that souls are fallen angels trapped in endless cycles of rebirth, agonized by their earthly traps of flesh. The film seems to suggest that it is only during orgasm that the soul transmigrates into another body. This idea gets extended into the motif of motherhood as another instance of body swapping, one in which the women’s womb becomes a host for another person. In a gradual dissolution of individual identity, blurred memories pass onto the next generation in a fatal chain of reincarnation. It’s not entirely clear whether the separation between body and soul is a straightforward one in The Unknown. We are never quite sure whether it is really David trapped in Eva’s body or someone else entirely, a new hybrid subject.
Enter an insane side character: Malia’s father, played by none other than Romanian cult director Radu Jude, in his acting debut, which has him operating a crane and citing Marcus Aurelius. In a dramatic wedding scene, he reunites with his beloved daughter who went missing, but doesn’t recognize her in David’s unhappy body, with unwashed hair and a bum goatee—before she ultimately leaves her earthly shell by jumping from a bridge. As his body passes away, David lives on in Eva’s body. Or so it seems. The boundaries between them are blurry. A person, Harari’s film suggests, is distributed over multiple bodies, never quite arriving at home anywhere. There are remainders and traces of alterity in each ensouled body—the substance of “the unknown” is a virus that infects everyone, joining bodies in one big demonic orgasm. At the same time, we are all alone in a body that feels alien even to ourselves.
Some critics have read Harari’s film as a trans allegory, but it crosses gender boundaries in a more unsettling and ambiguous way. There is, for instance, an unexpectedly tender connection between Malia-as-David and David-as-Eva. In what is probably the weirdest sex scene, David’s body (Malia’s soul) fucks Eva’s body (David’s soul), which ends up not only as a confusing maelstrom of gender identities, but also a deeply unsatisfying experience. Without lust or pleasure, we learn, no soul can swap bodies. The Unknown is as much a cinematic experiment with identity as a reflection on the existential feeling of loneliness in our own bodies, alienated not only from others but, most essentially, ourselves.
Bodies merge with machines in Francisco Marise’s hybrid gem Truck Driver, a melancholic homage to all those nameless women and men spending their lives on Argentina’s roads. Screened in the Proxima Competition, Marise’s second feature had its world premiere at Karlovy Vary. One of the festival’s most impressive films, Truck Driver is an original take on a familiar genre—a road movie without a road, one less interested in driving than the pauses between journeys, fleeting encounters, and times of waiting. What do truck drivers do when the engines are switched off? Marise collages a tight, patiently unraveling series of vignettes portraying different drivers. He captures them unobtrusively, bathed in roadside glow, often during twilight, when night sets in at empty gas stations, parkways, motels, deserted roadside restaurants, and repair shops.
Truck Driver’s universe is one of melancholic solitude and the magical promise of freedom, driven by the pull of the open road. Often, the only sound we hear is the steady stream of traffic, rolling like an asphalt sea. Music and dialogue are used sparsely and purposefully. It’s a deeply meditative experience, a cinema of liminality and pauses, capturing the threshold between consciousness and dream through cross-faded images of roads and trucks, all tinged with red neon light. It feels like a distant memory of a nighttime car ride, between stop and go, waking and sleep. Nameless people pass by nameless places, all connected in their solitude by the shared road.
The life of a truck driver is fueled by gasoline and endless cups of mate. We see drivers sleeping in their trucks, sharing intimate conversations, listening to the radio, or fishing near the roadside, the traffic lights flickering in the dark water. In one vignette, a trucker mom—her vehicle plastered in pink plush—video-calls her son to ask about school, but the connection keeps dropping, so we never actually get to hear his story. On the road, you’re always somewhere else. One driver suspects his wife is cheating on him, so he has his tarot cards read, during which he opens up about his childhood trauma: “I became a truck driver to see if I could find my dad, and ask if he’s happy with what he did, abandoning me so young.” The road becomes a medium of self-discovery, the truck its silent witness. Truck drivers are universal figures, but they feel especially resonant in Central and Eastern Europe, a crossroads shaped by migration and logistics.
Marise’s film is as rich in moments of severe beauty as in lighthearted fun: Two drivers share a bar of soap over a gas station sink; a man venerates a gaucho statue at the dusty side of a road, the camera slowly lingering over a makeshift shrine with flowers and plastic bottles as offerings; a couple debates baby names before falling asleep; two strangers dance in a deserted bar. There’s a hilarious TV commercial that features a garage owner diving through stacks of tires: “More than thirty years of experience in tire repair! The Maradona of Tires!”
An ingenious montage sequence shows the director’s craft of poetic association: A driver lighting a candle in a shrine ignites Bach’s St. Matthew Passion; a close-up of the burning candles cuts to a tracking shot of a truck crossing a bridge at night, the orange glow of the streetlights echoing the flames. When the choir starts, Marise abruptly shifts to extreme close-ups of a truck’s diesel engine: pistons, gears, belts, and wheels moving in perfect harmony, like a Baroque church organ.
The film’s most memorable scene, however, unfolds towards the end. A man and a trans woman share a bath in the fittingly named Hotel Kiss Me. It can only be described as petrol porn, extremely funny and full of erotic atmosphere: a brief moment of tenderness between trips. He plays engine sounds from his phone, she guesses which truck it is: “Let’s see if you pass the truck driver test!”—“That’s a Scania.”—“Jammy bitch!”—“The Scania has a unique sound. There are no engines like the Scania.” The lovers are turned on by the growl of a French truck engine. As their bodies slowly move through the steamy foam, the roar of motors swells on the soundtrack. Dreams in diesel and eight cylinders.
When on the road, you never know how long you will be away. Ultimately, we are all lonely, either missing loved ones or having nobody who waits for us: “You will only be happy when you are sad,” the voice-over states. “And only when you wish to die will you feel alive. It will be then, in the asphaltic solitude, where you will become invincible. You will be everything and you will be nothing.” The journey ends only once you have experienced all the places on the road. But there’s still a long way to go.
